Choppy speech describes degradation where there are gaps in the speech signal. The degradation manifests itself as syllables appearing to be dropped or delayed. The speech is often described as a stuttering or a staccato. It is sometimes referred to as time-clipped speech or broken voice. It is generally periodic in nature, although the rate of chop and duration of chops can vary depending on the cause and on network parameters.
Choppy speech occurs for a variety of reasons such as CPU overload, low bandwidth, congestion, codec mismatch, or latency. When frames are missed or packets are dropped, segments of the speech are lost. This can occur at any location within speech, but is more noticeable and has a higher impact on perceived quality when it occurs in the middle of a vowel phoneme than during a silence period. Choppy speech is indeed a problematic issue in Internet audio delivery, such as VoIP systems.